Junior Year

Well, here I am again.  Off on another international summer adventure.  I guess I have something against staying in the US when I'm not in school?  Anyway, this adventure is looking to be even bigger and grander than the last, and I'm quite excited.  Keeping the tradition of previous years, I'll give you a quick overview of my activities in the intervening year, as well as my lessons from last summer, before diving into my chronicle of the present adventures.

So, this year was another busy one for me, but then again, they all are. :P  Looking back I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to do my thesis/independent work requirement this year instead of next.  Granted, I got to work on a really cool project, and the professor is really nice as a friend, but it was a difficult experience and I struggled a lot during the year.  The professor was visiting for the year from California Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo (CalPoly for short) and teaching a class in the fall about autonomous robots.  Since that's my main area of interest within mechanical engineering, of course I wanted to take the class.  Unfortunately, it directly conflicted with my Mechanical Design course, which I was not allowed to delay until next year.  So, I asked Dr. Clark if he had any research projects going which he wanted undergraduate help with, since I didn't want to pass up this opportunity to learn from an expert in the field.  He replied that he wanted students for two projects: cistern mapping in Malta and shark tracking in California.  Of the two, sharks sounded more interesting, so I volunteered to work on that project and have this professor as my advisor.  After much finagling, I got ahold of my departmental advisor and he told me how to get the project counted for credit, and I was delighted when the undergraduate coordinator for mechanical engineering informed me that this project would fulfill my independent work requirement for the department (read: I don't have to do a thesis next year).

The project was using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV, it looks like a torpedo) equipped with acoustic telemetry to track organisms underwater.  Apart from all the technical jargon, it works by catching a shark (or fish) and clipping an acoustic tag to it.  This tag sends out a signal (beep) at a certain frequency every few seconds.  The AUV is equipped with hydrophones (acoustic receivers) which pick up on this signal.  Since there are two of them, it determines the direction the signal came from using the difference between when each of the hydrophones received the signal.  It can only do this in a single plane (not 3-D) and cannot distinguish between the two sides of the robot, so we adjust our driving pattern to figure out whether the tag is on the left or the right.  The professor has been working on this project for a couple of years, so they had already implemented this system for a single AUV and were now looking to extend it to multiple AUVs.  This, of course, introduces difficulties such as sharing information between the robots (we installed a modem on each robot so they could communicate), controlling them so that they work together to provide the maximum amount of information, and designing a motion planner so that they don't run into each other.

I was shy about the coding aspects of the project, since I had never taken a computer science class past the introductory one, and so I volunteered to do what sounded easiest, which was to verify and refine the sensor model for the receivers, and build a new frame for the hydrophones.  I did the first part during the fall semester, and learned a lot about self-directed work in the process (namely, that I should have tried harder to work on it during the entire semester instead of leaving it all until Christmas break when my advisor wasn't available).  I had a really hard time with the report, as well, since I had never really written anything of this magnitude before (73 pages!) and was unclear on the format.  In retrospect, it was a terrible paper, particularly since I didn't really understand what I was doing and my advisor told me five days before the report was due to redo all of my results because my method didn't make any sense.  When I did it the way he wanted, the results got worse compared to the default method, which changed all of my conclusions and sent me scrambling to explain why I spent all semester doing something that hurt instead of helping.  I also had a poster session the first week back which I completely bombed, because I had no idea how to make a poster in the correct format, chose to hand-make it instead of printing and left it until the last minute.  I was 20 minutes late to the 1-hour poster session and my poster was smaller than the minimum requirement.  Despite all that (and it was rough, let me tell you) I got a B- for the semester, but I vowed to learn from my mistakes and do better in the spring.

This worked slightly, but since the system I needed to test didn't come in until after Spring Break and my advisor had a couple of poorly-timed conferences to attend near the end of the semester, I still found myself in serious crunch and had to reach out to my friends for help with the experiments I needed to run (since they required holding the tag and receivers 50, 100, and 150 meters away from each other, I obviously couldn't do them by myself, not to mention transporting all the materials the 1.5 miles from the E quad down to the lake).  But the members of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship once again showed themselves to be amazing and I had no less than five separate people come help me gather all my data.  The second-semester report was much more professional and polished than the first, but there were still some serious flaws.  I attribute at least some of my poor experience to the lack of feedback I received; to illustrate, consider that though I sent my advisor a draft of my report three weeks before the deadline (even though I hadn't done any of my experiments yet O.o) and he promised to read it, he forgot and I didn't know that until 5 days before the due date when he asked why I hadn't sent him any thing yet.  Regardless, my poster was also much better (properly sized and completed on time), though in the 2.5-hour poster session I only talked to about 4 professors (25% of your semester grade for the project comes from the grades assigned by the professors at the poster session, less the highest and lowest grades). All told, I ended up getting a B for the second semester, which I thought a rather small grade increase for the additional amount of work I put into the project for the spring :P

All was not lost, however.  Through this experience I have discovered that I do not do very well with self-directed independent work; I much prefer to be given small, concrete tasks to complete and to be regularly supervised.  I suppose that's a good thing to know for next year when I'm looking for a job I'll enjoy.